It was unclear whether the woman who harangued me at the entrance to the English Cemetery in Lisbon was an employee or someone who had taken up station there especially to inconvenience tourists seeking the grave of Henry Fielding.

I was in Lisbon for Ican IV, the International Conference on the Ancient Novel. Ancient Greek and Roman fiction has always interested me, and it's curious how many well-lettered people see the novel as the progeny of Fielding and his contemporaries.

Some may mention Philip Sidney or Cervantes. A few people will go further back to Apuleius or Petronius, but hardly anyone outside the academic world can namecheck their contemporaries, the Greek-using novelists who were at work at the height of imperial Rome - Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus.

This wasn't always the case when the classics were the core of education. Cervantes was proudest not of Don Quixote but of Persiles and Sigismunda, a wooden fable that owed much to Heliodorus. Apuleius's Golden Ass has been called Shakespeare's favourite novel and Flaubert, too, was an admirer, lauding its mixture of "urine and incense".

Like many classics, the ancient novels read as an intriguing blend of the dated and the more contemporary. Take Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon. One of the main strands of the story is the heroine Leucippe hanging on to her virginity, rather like Richardson's Pamela (but in more trying circumstances: pirates, brigands and slavery, not merely a tiresome employer with wandering fingers).

Appropriately for a novel written under the sponsorship of Eros, there are also discussions of which is more satisfying, sex with boys or with girls. "Yes, Zeus desired a Phrygian boy and took this Phrygian boy up to heaven; but the beauty of women brought Zeus himself down from heaven." The female orgasm is described in glorious detail, and there is a paean to the pleasure of buggering boys.

The closing address at the conference was by the American novelist Steven Saylor, best known for historical crime fiction set in Rome, featuring his 'tec, Gordianus the Finder. It was an apposite choice because the ancient novels are themselves "historical", with exotic settings, and while the detective story might be an invention of the 19th century, lowlife, criminals and courtroom drama are their lifeblood. What we consider genre or commercial fiction, pulp or romance are in fact the oldest forms of prose fiction.Tibor Fischer

Richard and Judy said goodbye to Channel 4 yesterday, which could mean the party is over for authors and publishers. According to the Bookseller, over five years their book club recommendations have sold 26m copies with a retail value of £158m, with novels by Alice Sebold, Kate Mosse and Audrey Niffenegger topping the "total life sales" chart.

The book club will continue, and the pair's producer Amanda Ross has cannily linked up with the Daily Mail, but their audiences on digital UKTV will be tiny. Views differ on how much that matters. In the same article a Tesco manager argues "the power is in the stickers on the books", not the TV show, whereas a brand consultant compares the shift to "Heinz baked beans being taken out of supermarkets and only available in corner shops".

If he's right, and being a book-club choice no longer guarantees a jump in sales, the likely consequences are far from depressing. Publishers will discover better things to do than devoting months to pitching titles to Ross twice a year; while authors will benefit from book-buyers' cash no longer going disproportionately to a handful of novels, and should find their editors less fed up with them for not writing so-called "Richard and Judy books".John Dugdale

If you're worried the gushing quotes on books' jackets are not always genuine, a new service in America will do little to set your mind at rest. Blurbings.com will get you 10 quotes for $19.95 and 30 for $29.95. Since being launched a month ago it has had 29 customers and caused quite a stir. Views on literary blogs vary from outraged to resigned.

Blurbings.com's creators, Emily Maroutian and Jenna Peak, are keen to point out that their site merely acts as the middleman and the blurbers' only payment is publicity. They were trying to save small presses the time and expense of printing 20 or 30 manuscripts, sending them out to prospective blurbers and chasing them up for responses. Maroutian points out that they use only apt quotes: "So it's not a horror writer doing a blurb for a children's book."

Authors exhausted by trying to obtain puffs the conventional way might find Blurbings attractive. In a recent article on Salon.com the novelist Rebecca Johnson described pressure from her publisher to trawl for praise from big names, calling the lengthy process "a corrupt quid pro quo". At one point she jokily asked her editor "How about Philip Roth?" only to receive the reply: "Great, have you got his email?"Ravi Somaiya

China Reflected - a project in which British writers who have been to China and Chinese writers who have been to Britain exchange stories - begins on the books site on Monday with a short story by Hari Kunzru. See guardian.co.uk/books.